We have the TouchWiz UI of Samsung on the Star 3 featuring the dock with shortcut icons at the bottom to launch your phonebook, dialer and message services. The pull-down notification bar contains connectivity switches to toggle on and off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the sound profile.

There are even a couple of widgets you can place on your phone's home screens, like digital clock, weather, My Buddies, and also Facebook and Twitter widgets for quick access. You can also place shortcuts to nine most used applications on one of the home screens, saving you a tap to go into the paginated main menu. Navigating around and scrolling lists often lag quite a bit overall.

We have the TouchWiz UI on the Samsung Star 3

Typing on the 3” display is not easy, but the keys are fairly big, blocking most of the other view, so it is bearable for the occasional text message or short email.

Messaging

From the preinstalled apps we have the usual helpful bunch - a document viewer, organizer, calculator and voice recorder - all of which can come in handy, considering you don't have any application store to turn to for options.

Browser and Connectivity:

Complex pages are a doozy for the NetFront browser on the Star 3, and take a while to load, returning a “page size too large” error, or crash it altogether. For basic browsing it does the job, especially if the website has a stripped-down mobile version, but dragging the page around for navigation is a pain for those used to pinch, double-tap and scroll swiftly on a modern mobile browser.

There is a full screen browser mode, which allows much more from the page to be seen and interacted with.

The Samsung Star 3 comes with 2G radio only, meaning you will be reveling at slow EDGE download speeds, and it skimps on the GPS chip. Wi-Fi connectivity and Bluetooth 3.0 are onboard, though, as well as FM Radio with RDS.

Camera:

The 3MP shooter on the back of the Samsung Star 3 unsurprisingly lacks a flash, and the interface is very basic, with only a few white balance settings and basic effects like Sepia. But hey, there is a night mode for low light photography.

Camera interface

The pictures outdoor turned out decent for the category of the phone, with pretty accurate colors and enough detail, but a bit murky and on the soft side. Indoor shots are passable under strong lighting, with noise levels growing exponentially when the lights get dimmed down.

Outdoor samples shot with the Samsung Star 3

Strong

Medium

Low light

Indoor samples

Video can be captured only in QCIF definition with 15 fps, which renders it almost useless.

Samsung Star 3 Sample Video:

Multimedia:

The music player supports categorization by artists, albums and playlists, but the tiny display and low resolution soften your desire to load the phone with playlists and scroll merrily through hundreds of songs. The loudspeaker sounds tinny and a bit crackling, but the volume strength is quite good.

Music player

The Star 3 can be loaded with MPEG-4 videos, and it plays them fine up to the screen's resolution, so it could kill time for you while waiting somewhere, but that's about it. You have to manually turn the video in landscape mode with a button as there is no accelerator sensor.

Your argument would be correct if this were a smartphone... but it isn't. It is a "feature phone". This is one of a very few instances in which a feature phone has been equipped with Wi-Fi. In fact, I would dare to say that this phone effectively blurs the line between the lowest-end smartphones and the highest-end feature phones.

This would be a good phone for someone who doesn't want to pay the exorbitant prices for a smartphone plan, but still get most of the smartphone experience!

The Star II was way better in terms of user interface, it had multitasking, a hundred times better browser and even in the camera and video recording. This not at all feels like a successor, feels more like it is the predecessor of the Samsung Star II.

All content (phone reviews, news, specs, info), design and layouts are Copyright 2001-2015 phoneArena.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part or in any form or medium without written permission is prohibited! Privacy . Terms of use . Cookies . Team